[hilbert42]

"Mt. St. Helens was 7 megatons and 17 megatons of other thermal energy released..."

Well, at minimum, that's still between 400 and 700 times the energy released during the Hiroshima explosion. That's over two magnitudes more energy and I'm glad I wasn't anywhere near it at the time. ;-)

The Tsar Bomba (which I remember as a kid) had to be made to prove a point but as Kurchatov, Sakharov etc. seemed to realize at the time, making the 100 megaton bomb wouldn't add much to the argument (presumably other than additional cost). There was no point making a bigger bomb as the additional energy essentially would have been blown out into space thus not substantially increasing the blast area.

Anyway, that's not the point which is that even on piddling little earth nature has ways of producing huge amounts of destructive energy. As for supernovas, etc. except by way of mathematical calculations, I don't think the average human can actually contemplate or imagine energy on such a scale.

[throwawaylinux]

It was the point of the sentence I was responding to, which claimed that nuclear bombs were not comparable to volcanoes in terms of energy released. They are, at least volcanoes like Mt. St. Helens.

The Americans made bombs larger than St. Helens too.